Contax 645

The reason people still hunt these down twenty-five years later is one lens: the 80mm f/2 Planar. Wide open, a face floats and the background dissolves into nothing, and that single look built a whole aesthetic. Kyocera shipped the Contax 645 in 1999 with the thing nobody else had managed in medium format, a fast autofocus Zeiss lens on a 6x4.5 body that handled like a serious 35mm SLR. The mount lived and died with this one body. A working kit costs more now than it did used in 2008, and the glass is why.

In the hand it is big and dense, more brick than jewel, but the controls land where your fingers expect. The prism finder is bright. The autofocus is not fast by modern standards, but it actually locks, which was close to science fiction for medium format in 1999. You get aperture priority, shutter priority, and full manual, an interchangeable film back, and a built-in winder that runs 120 or 220 without you thinking about it. The focal-plane shutter stretches from a long 32 seconds up to about 1/4000, with flash sync near 1/125. The TTL meter is genuinely good, and it offers both spot and center-weighted, so you are not stuck guessing in mixed light.

Who shoots it: wedding and portrait photographers, almost entirely. Fashion shooters too. Anyone who wanted Zeiss rendering on a negative four times the size of 35mm without crawling under a dark cloth. The cult around it has only grown as digital fatigue sends people back to film, and clean bodies move fast when they surface.

Here is the honest part. This body is electronic to its bones, and Kyocera left the camera business in 2005. No factory support, no spare parts pipeline, and a dead mainboard usually means a dead camera. The whole thing runs on a 2CR5, so a flat cell in the field turns it into a paperweight until you swap one. Working examples get treated like organ donors, parts harvested from broken ones. Buy from someone who will let you run a few rolls first.

The meter is reliable, but every reflected reading bends toward the tones it sees, and a strong backlight pulls the exposure toward the highlights. The body meters spot or center-weighted, both reflected, so for a backlit portrait against a bright window, take an incident or shadow-spot reading with the Zone Light Meter app and place the shadows on the zone you actually want. The negative has the room. You just have to tell it where to land instead of letting the scene decide.

Against a Pentax 645N it is the more refined and more fragile choice. Against a Hasselblad it gives up leaf-shutter flash flexibility for autofocus and that one extraordinary lens. People buy it knowing the risk, because nothing else on film looks quite like an 80mm f/2 Planar wide open, and that gamble (gorgeous glass riding on electronics nobody can fix) is what every owner signs up for.